Beginning in February, 2013, PC-BSD® switched from the traditional FreeBSD ports system to pkgng, the next generation package management system for FreeBSD.

Users of PC-BSD® 9.1-RELEASE will not be affected by this change unless they upgrade or install a rolling release.

All of the PC-BSD® utilities that deal with installing or updating software now use the pkgng system. This allows users to safely install non-PBI software from the command line without that software being deleted by a system upgrade.

Since FreeBSD does not have an official pkgng repository yet, the PC-BSD® project provides its own repository containing all of the packages that can be built using pkgng.

PC-BSD® provides a custom command, pc-pkg, which is a small wrapper to pkg. When pc-pkg is used with the install or upgrade flags, it will automatically connect to the PC-BSD® pkgng repository using the integrated aria2 downloader utility, which can significantly reduce download speeds over a slow link.

If you are used to using the traditional FreeBSD package system, you will notice that the commands used to install and manage software differ slightly. For example, instead of using pkg_add to install a package from a remote repository, use pkg install or pc-pkg install (notice there is now a space instead of an underscore). Type man pkg to see a list of the available commands. Once you know the name of a command, you can use the built-in help system to get more information about that command. For example, to learn more about pkg install, type pkg help install.